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I got pwned by my cloud costs

troyhunt.com

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Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#251

Post by llampx »

pid-1 wrote: post #173
lpcvoid wrote: post #56

Can somebody explain to me why I wouldn't just rent a 40 EUR dedicated server from Hetzner with unlimited traffic and gigabit uplink? His 600GB/day is way less than what you get over a gigabit link within a day. Sure, sudden bursts would perhaps "throttle" at a gigabit, but according to his article that was only the cloudflare proxy anyhow, so no pain in having that take a few seconds longer. As far as I am concerned…

I have a few dozens of personal projects on AWS using APIGW, Lambda, CloudFront, Dynamo DB and S3. Their monthly cost is something between 0 and a few cents. Stuff like Hertzner is fine, but if you know your way around AWS you realize have massive cost savings. Prob the same for Azure. Finally, in many places 40 EUR for a pet project is actually a lot of money.

> Finally, in many places 40 EUR for a pet project is actually a lot of money.

Doesn't change the equation, unless you set up all your PAYG cloud infrastructure and never use it.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#252

Post by hardwaresofton »

ashkulz wrote: post #228
hardwaresofton wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah sorry I should have been clearer on this -- "global cache" === CDN. Hetzner does incur a performance latency (unless you use the brand new US DC of course, and your customer happens to be in the US). IIRC right now you can't mix US cloud servers and German ones in the same Load balancer (also a relatively new hetzner cloud feature) but of course you can do some DNS tricks and get the loads to be fast. Actually hos…

Why not use CloudFlare in front? That's what was being used anyway, as per the article.

> so basically the ideal solution here would be to deploy a simple Hetzner app (caddy/nginx or the hosted options hetzner has), set up a cheap CDN (Bunny, Cloudflare, etc) in front of it

I agree! Cloudflare probably won't be this cheap forever but like I said I think that's the optimal solution, with the option to cut over and take the latency penalty if costs are out of control.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#253

Post by kuu »

herodoturtle wrote: post #57
kuu wrote: post #47

One thing I hate about the cloud providers is that there isn't an option to set a maximum cost. I would prefer to plug the cable of my side project than just receive an email saying me that next bill is going to be over my cost. I understand not everyone would like to do that, but I would like to have that option.

I assume you meant “pull” or “unplug” the cable :)

Yes ;)

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#254

Post by xfer »

viraptor wrote: post #210
welterde wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably would run just fine on a <= 4 euro/month virtual machine too. Of course it doesn't quite scale to zero like APIGW,lambda,etc. but on the other hand you can be fairly confident to not pay more if your pet project suddenly lands on the front page of HN.

Keep in mind that the "<= 4 euro/month virtual machine" has maybe 256MB of RAM available and running anything beyond nginx + a web server which needs to be cycled every few days due to memory fragmentation can become challenging. I've tried this many times, but it's just not worth the extra hassle. And I want a vpn, monitoring and database even on the toy project server as a minimum in reality.

Make up your mind: https://www.netcup.eu/vserver/vps.php

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#255

Post by alpaca128 »

rcarmo wrote: post #83
lpcvoid wrote: post #56

Can somebody explain to me why I wouldn't just rent a 40 EUR dedicated server from Hetzner with unlimited traffic and gigabit uplink? His 600GB/day is way less than what you get over a gigabit link within a day. Sure, sudden bursts would perhaps "throttle" at a gigabit, but according to his article that was only the cloudflare proxy anyhow, so no pain in having that take a few seconds longer. As far as I am concerned…

Because they provide managed services that VPS hosters don't have or which would require the overhead of maintaining and patching servers, and many people just want to get on with their lives instead of worrying about OS exploits...

But they do offer managed servers.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#256

Post by fabian2k »

patrec wrote: post #158
zzt123 wrote: post #18

Interestingly, Troy says that egress is expensive on Azure at $0.014 AUD/gB (~$0.010 USD/gB), but that is the same price as additional egress for Linode and DO, and Linode egress has never struck me as expensive. In fact, I’m kind of shocked (as an AWS user) that Azure egress is the same price as Linode. Actually, wow it seems AWS is also the same price as Linode and DO for egress. While Linodes and DO do come with d…

How can $10 per TB not strike you as expensive? You can easily download that much a day on consumer broadband that will cost you far less than $10/day.

If you download the data twice at that price point, you could buy an HDD to store it for the same price (the bigger HDDs seem to be at ~ 18 EUR per TB here).

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#257

Post by kuu »

cma wrote: post #134
kuu wrote: post #47

One thing I hate about the cloud providers is that there isn't an option to set a maximum cost. I would prefer to plug the cable of my side project than just receive an email saying me that next bill is going to be over my cost. I understand not everyone would like to do that, but I would like to have that option.

They'd rather refund small guys for mistakes than give big guys an easy limit to set.

I guess big guys don't want they service to suddenly stop, so they probably would not use this... But it's just a guess

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#258

Post by sascha_sl »

buro9 wrote: post #107

Don't put Cloudflare in front of a Cloud egress bill. i.e. don't do this: Azure|Amazon > Cloudflare Always use your own proxy where the egress is well within your free tier, i.e. do this: Azure|Amazon > Hetzner|Linode > Cloudflare Why? Because Cloudflare cache is a massively multi-tenant LRU cache and whilst hot files will be cached well (and with Cloudflare Tiered Cache even better - but this itself is a cost) anyth…

Or simply use a proper CDN that doesn't pretend to eat all the cost for a flat fee but then sometimes does not. BunnyCDN has an amazing volume tier at half a cent per GB.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#260

Post by martinald »

3pt14159 wrote: post #140
Dave3of5 wrote: post #77

Ah the old cloud provider switcheroo. Yip this is the way they make money. They make it easy to setup some gigantic hugely scalable website then hit you with a gigantic scaled up bill. AWS would do this as well. Team I'm in at the moment is in the early stages of cloud adoption but the company in total has fell hook line and sinker for AWS. When I mentioned the cost there is always an excuse. The main one being that…

I can see both sides. If you're a startup that needs to be able to scale quickly if product market fit is achieved, the cloud really saves your bacon. Or is your ten person team really going to figure out how to get Postgres to reliably run with billions of records, with encrypted backups, etc? It's basically a form of permanent debt. Faster product market fit, higher long term infrastructure costs until you have eno…

I don't disagree; but I think the cloud (AWS/Azure/GCP) have sort of shielded people from how cheap/powerful the underlying hardware has became.

For ~100eur/month on hertzner you can get a 16core Zen3, 128GB RAM with 8TB of NVMe SSD.

Unless your stack is horrendously badly optimised you can serve SO MUCH traffic off that - definitely billions of postgres records without breaking a sweat.

So the scale argument somewhat disappears - if anything, people end up adding much more complexity to the product to get round the high hardware costs of the cloud (complex caching systems for example, instead of just throwing loads of hardware at the problem).

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